While you’re trying to be insulting and trying to equate known marketing practices and psychology as a conspiracy, it’s those designs that are specifically designed to keep pulling on certain levers in the human mind subconsciously because at the core of it we all still have lizard brains.
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I am well aware of how predatory and seedy MTX can get, and how it can infiltrate and sour every aspect of a game. However, it is still my opinion, that this is an issue of incompetency over malice. And I don’t see any proof pointing it out otherwise. They just as easily could’ve permanently removed, or never even added, a merge strike teams button. With all of the other missing or broken features this game had at launch, I believe that makes a much stronger case for a simple lack of features or a priority for a sense of community over monetization.
Don’t get me wrong I hate the Darktide cash store. I think it is disgusting, overpriced, anti consumer, etc etc. It’s awful and it will always be a blight on the game. But I don’t believe it is the reason for certain other systems not being present.
It was a joke
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I think the lack of ready up in the hub (and hotkeys) is a huge oversight/regression (for pugs and premades). The missions setup I am mostly ambivalent on, but I understand the frustrations. I prefer DT’s dedicated servers, and could see how that might factor into that choice.
But I don’t agree that cosmetics are the core of why things are different in DT. The hub in DT is thematically aligned with the scenario we’re in. Honestly, I wish there were more players in the hub to give it even more life and atmosphere. But with either 4 or 16 players, paid cosmetics still exist in both games, and I fail to see a meaningful distinction between the two.
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I think cosmetics is a big part of it, but it’s not the only part of it.
There is obviously a desire to try new things, to adapt to new infrastructure, etc. but those exacerbates Fatshark’s seeming inability to learn from itself and other developers that have solved or made their own solutions to problems that Darktide currently have, QoL being the most obvious one.
Cosmetics is a big justification on why they continue to sit on those problems.
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It’s neither incompetency nor malice. It’s a conscious design decision meant to ensure that the game is profitable.
Conversely, I see all the features that are common to such monetisation arrangements (and there are/were a TON of them in this game) and am convinced that they’re there by-design, rather than as a result of a lack of time to develop/polish features.
You can indeed level multiple characters to 30 without knowing what any of the mission card info means.
If you never look at a mission card.
That is pretty much the only possible way.
And in that case, it does not matter what information is displayed in the first place.
No way to actually blame that on the card not displaying the info in an accessible way.
You could also level up multiple psykers to lvl 30, without knowing what the class is called, or that you have talent points available.
But again, that is not the fault of the game for displaying the info in a bad way. That would be the fault of the player for simply not looking.
I mostly worked on Vermintide, and I wasn’t a designer or programmer. Don’t put words in my mouth.
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Plenty good feedback here. You’re absolutely right about maps being incredibly samey, and all the sound stuff, and the UI stuff. Obviously for those of us who have played hundreds or thousands of hours, we’ve gone ‘blind’ to UI stuff because we already did the work of learning it all. Really useful feedback as to how it all comes across to new players, and onboarding is really important in games.
So you’re out? A new job opportunity?
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So Long, Farewell, and Thanks for All the Rats!
Grad school, mostly. I do accessibility UX elsewhere, though, but ofc have my eyes peeled for anything exciting!
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Oh, good luck with your masters! Since I don’t frequent V2 forums (anymore), I completely missed that. Thanks for the link and best of luck.
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I mean the real test is pretty simple: can people name and describe each map in a way that doesn’t make them sound incredibly similar?
I find for a lot of Darktide maps they kind of fail that test where something like L4D 1/2 easily pass it. Vermintide also does really well in this regard as many areas are visually distinct and the objectives tend to be relatively unique.
Darktide gets bogged down with a lot of “use the data pad and then defend the area” kind of objectives.
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There’s the one with the train at the end…I think that’s consignment yard? And…uh…I think one of the outdoors ones is called vox tower or something.
Hab dreyko is the apartment one but I don’t remember if thats a tile set or the name of the mission.
Oh! I just remembered Ascension Riser! That’s the one with the big platform that goes up at the end and moving the trains in the middle!
And Archivum Sick - o - rats. One of my favorite missions.
But yeah that’s it. Over 900 hours in the game and I had to think really hard to remember the names of the missions and didn’t even get half of them. Not great.
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I’m in kind of a similar boat despite having a couple hundred hours.
Both assassination missions are amazingly similar and only thing I really remember is one ends in a train station and the other ends in a prison.
I think the Torrent Investigation you need to cross a big bridge after going up a big elevator. The other mission in that similar area you cross a big bridge and go down an elevator.
Han Drako investigating is a somewhat painstaking mission of scanning in jab areas while getting bombarded by hordes.
There is a repair mission in the factory sector with the big smelter and one I think with the cooling rods.
All 3 of hour glass missions run together. I know one is a repair that ends with a radar dish I think, one is that toxin refinery I hate so much and the other had the pneumatic tubes.
The strike in throne side we lower a big bridge. Another throne side we send a message. Finally we have the one where we do the ventilation hallway run and then scan in the section.
Like you said I do remember the one with a train at the end. It really does not help that many of the objectives are arbitrary.
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I can go through pretty much the “concept” of every mission. I do have that memorized. It’s just what the name of the mission is called? On top of like you said them sharing a lot of similarities? It did not stick with me, and after a certain amount of time I just stopped looking at the mission name. We would just call it “the train one” “the one where you move ammo at the end” "an assassination mission (like you we wouldn’t make the distinction between the 2 of them). Hope they eventually go back and give them actual mission names at some point.
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I’m 1000+ hours in and I still don’t really know which maps are which, outside of a select few that I love or hate.
TBH there’s just not really a reason to care, aside from loving or hating them. They’re all samey enough that playing one mission on a map set feels like any other mission on that set.
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As much as I hate to agree with you, you are most correct. There’s about 4 maps I can now remember by name AND mission content.
The others melt together in a giant hot pot of textured corridor stew.
To quote the Healing Station: “Pieces of my mind are floating away. Please help. Pleeeasseee!”
I think the issue starts with the odd naming convention of the sectors.
The 2nd issue is mission types not having a clear identity. Yes, we all know that Investigation is the beep-boop-scanning, but other than that the rest is not entirely clear. This is made worse by mission types being scrambled.
One Sabotaging mission has Investigation elements.
The next Repair mission has sabotaging elements. Etc.
It’s all thrown together and not consistently enforced, so you don’t even know what is supposed to be what else.
If mission structure isn’t guaranteed and the mission type a rather vague “idea” rather a clear protocol of operations, why bother having a mission type to begin with? At that point, giving missions a unique layout and name is the better fit.
Alternatively they should have the majority of mission events be in line with what the mission type is.
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